On the 20th of February, Ingmar Bergman delivered an address at the Swedish Film Academy. The following tribute to Victor Sjöström is a slightly abridged translation of that address.

No. I can't compose a speech in memory of Victor Sjöström. I suspect he would smile with the utmost irony if he could see me making such a speech.

Instead, I shall simply pass on a few brief impressions—jottings set down in my notebook while we were actually filming Wild Strawberries. They are very personal lines my pencil has drawn. But for me they are like engravings, and very much alive.

What I and the rest of us in the team who were filming at that time witnessed was the struggle of a tremendous will against the forces of annihilation. From moment to moment this struggle raged on, with victories and defeats equal on either side.

But when the film was finished and the artist no longer had a strict working routine, like a bulwark, to protect him, the enemy took a merciless revenge and plunged him into nameless suffering. His soul tried in vain to ward off the threat of refrigeration, extinction. The prison walls of his chosen isolation became thicker and thicker all around him...It was a cruelly tortured prisoner who was finally given his freedom.

I read a few lines from my diary:

"I can't rid myself of the notion that this old man is a child who has aged in some extraordinary way, having at birth been deprived of both parents and brothers or sisters; a child who is endlessly searching for a security that is just as endlessly denied him.

"It's for this reason he almost brutally rejects all affection that isn't sincere. He loathes it when people stretch out their soft, sticky fingers to catch him, and he spits on all half-hearted or self-seeking sympathy. Even so...

"In his mind's despairing duality he does not succeed in hiding or keeping secret his pain. In front of everyone who stands near him he shows his always infected, always open bleeding sore.

"The death of his wife...

"Ceaselessly he repeats his accusations against an unjust god who obliterated the only comforting reality he had and who cast him out into the waste land.

"His glance is for ever trying to pierce through the darkness. He is for ever trying to catch the sound of a reply to his terrified questions and despairing prayers. But the silence is complete."

Another page from my diary:

"I never stop pryingly, shamelessly studying this powerful face. Sometimes it is like a dumb cry of pain, sometimes it is distorted by mistrustful cruelty and senile querulousness, sometimes it dissolves into self-pity and astoundingly sentimental effusions.

"But there are also other moments which I shall never forget.

"Suddenly he can turn toward us with a smile, a gesture of spontaneous tenderness, his tone of voice expressing a subtle wisdom. At such times it becomes no effort at all for us to love him and we can meet him simply and in the sunniest concord."

A third jotting from my diary:

"We have shot our final supplementary scenes of Wild Strawberries—the final close-ups of Isak Borg as he is brought to clarity and reconciliation. His face shone with secretive light, as if reflected from another reality. His features became suddenly mild, almost effete. His look was open, smiling, tender.

"It was like a miracle.

"Then complete stillness—peace and clarity of soul. Never before or since have I experienced a face so noble and liberated.

"Yet it was all nothing more than a piece of acting in a dirty studio. And acting it had to be. This exceedingly shy human being would never have shown us lookers-on this deeply buried treasure of sensitive purity, if it had not been in a piece of acting; in simulation...

"In the presence of this face I recalled the final words of Strindberg's last drama The Great Highway: the prayer to a god somewhere in the darkness.

'Bless me, Thy humanity
That suffers, suffers from Thy gift of life!
Me first, who most have suffered—
Suffered most the pain of not being what I most would be.'"